The Power of Music - conversation with David LaMotte

Join the conversation at William Black Lodge in Montreat, NC Limited space. Reservations required! The Power of Music: An Conversation with David LaMotte Everyone has felt the power of music. As the midterm elections get underway, singer-songwriter and peacebuilder David LaMotte joins a host-led conversation exploring that power as an alternative to conventional understandings of power: what it makes possible, how it shows up in our lives, and how it spreads. Tuesday, October 27, 2026 | 6:30 - 8:00 pm | William Black Lodge, Montreat, NC Space is limited to 20 participants. more about the conversation: As this year's midterm elections get underway, power in its most familiar form dominates the national conversation: the power of government, institutions, and finance, the capacity to coerce, control, incarcerate, and kill. Our systems are built largely on an unexamined premise that safety comes from acquiring and holding that kind of power, and from withholding it from certain people and groups. The power of music is something else entirely. Unlike institutional power, it isn't abstract or contested. Everyone has felt it and knows in their body what it does. This evening takes that other kind of power seriously: not music as commentary on political power, but music as evidence of a different kind of power altogether, one that moves people, weaves communities, and sustains them without coercion. That kind of power is often dismissed as impractical or unsafe, much as nonviolence is dismissed with the line "that nonviolent stuff will get you killed." But the prevailing power structure has a logic that requires violence, and we've all witnessed that it gets people killed too. So the question for the evening: What does this other kind of power make possible, how does it show up in our lives and communities, and how might we practice it more deliberately, so that it grows and spreads? The format is simple: the evening will take place in one of the Lodge’s warm, welcoming spaces and will begin with a brief 10–15 minute exchange between David and host, Alalá Linda. From there, with Alalá holding the space, the conversation will expand into a real exchange among everyone present, and some music-making, because no conversation about the power of music is complete without it. Tuesday, October 27, 2026 | 6:30 - 8:00 pm | William Black Lodge, Montreat, NC Space is limited to 20 participants. RESERVATIONS REQUIRED